They find remains of Homo Antecessor in Atapuerca and years of great results are expected
The archaeological sites of Atapuerca (Burgos) are preparing for a “festival of finds” of different antiquities in the next campaign, after concluding the current one with progress in one of its most emblematic areas: the Gran Dolina, said this Friday one of the co-directors of the sites declared World Heritage Sites, Eudald Carbonell.
Another of the co-directors, José María Bermúdez de Castro, explained at the campaign's annual press conference that “everything was ready” this summer to reach level 6 of Gran Dolina, where the remains of Homo Antecessor were located, a hominid from 800,000 years ago only described in Atapuerca and which is considered the first genuinely European human species to date.
His forecast is that in the next five or six years, more than 300 remains of these hominids, more than a thousand lithic tools and hundreds of animals hunted and eaten by them can be removed from that site, in an area of about 25 square meters.
In fact, in this summer's campaign the upper part of that level has barely been scratched and fragments of a parietal bone and the phalanx of a toe have already been found.
In this campaign, they have also finished removing the remains of hundreds of bears that were found in another site, Sima de los Huesos, which were on the remains of pre-Neanderthal hominids from 400,000 years ago, which they will also reach in the 2024 campaign.
In addition, in the Sima del Elefante the researchers will work on a level from 1.4 million years ago, where part of the face of a hominid they named Pink appeared last season and which is, up to now, the “face of the first European”.
“Now we are finding its toolbox and this year we have extracted a quartzite contributed by hominids that corresponds to the first occupations in Europe, from 1.4 million years ago,” explained Carbonell.. Next summer he hopes to find more traces of his tools “and, with luck, some other part of his body.”
Important recent findings
The other co-director, Juan Luis Arsuaga, has highlighted the importance of other less old findings, but also relevant to science.
He has highlighted the remains related to the first cultivated fields, dating from the Neolithic period, 7,300 years ago, when farmers and ranchers from the eastern Mediterranean mixed with the hunter-gatherers who were already in Atapuerca.
The co-directors of Atapuerca and Gonzalo Santonja EFE
Among the remains found this year, he has also pointed out a large number of horses from about 7,000 years ago, when it is assumed that the first domesticated horses arrived on the Iberian Peninsula from the steppes of what is now Ukraine, in another wave of migrations.
“We assume that these were wild horses and their accumulation may be due to the fact that they were hunted to eat,” Arsuaga explained.
The three co-directors have offered the balance of the campaign this summer accompanied by the Minister of Culture of the Junta de Castilla y León, Gonzalo Santonja, who even shared a day of excavation with them and who has highlighted that Atapuerca is like “a management model that works very well and that we try to implement in other cultural heritage assets of the Community.